Contact centers are dedicated centers where agents perform customer service, sales, technical support, and back-office operations to cater to customers via call, live chat, email, SMS, and other mediums. In addition to providing services via voice and text agents must master efficient use of desktop applications, complex and multiple requests, call control and efficiently working customers to a solution, security, and following processes to name a few. The contact center role is not an easy one to master, and agents need coaching, support, and feedback in order to improve both their own performance and the quality of service being provided by the center as a whole.
The pandemic in 2020 presented contact centers with many operational challenges. With an increase in customer demand, businesses had to reevaluate the traditional ways of working and so started or expanded into remote contact centers. Remote contact centers offered a broader pool of agents as they didn’t need to be within commuting range of the contact center as well as more satisfied agents. However, monitoring and managing remote agents in a contact center is not without its own challenges.
Best Practices to Monitor a Remote Contact Center
Monitoring performance in a remote contact center presents companies with an entirely different set of challenges. Working from the same office allows face-to-face communication, direct observation, and collaboration. Since agents working contact center remote jobs are physically disconnected from the office environment, call centers need to develop a virtual counterpart to overcome such challenges.
Managing remote agents requires investing in online communications and workforce management solutions as well as adopting best practices to improve the quality of service. Consider adopting the following for improving your processes:
Invest in a Comprehensive Communication Platform
Keeping team members engaged is a key element of contact center success, and that’s even more true in the remote agent model. Consider every communication interaction between your management, support teams, and agents. and find a communication platform which provides a replacement solution on-line. Our teams use Smart Teams Communicator (STC) to provide performance data, communicate with team members, enable supervisor assistance, group and individual chat with teams for coaching, group knowledge, and community building. Supervisors can monitor team member desktops, conduct surveys, and pop quizzes, run contests, and recognize team members. We follow all the processes we use on-site to keep connected with our remote team members and our supervisors supporting a work-at-home team spend their entire day engaged with their team.
Define Quality Standards and Deliverables
Agents cannot fulfill the quality standards or deliverables unless they are properly addressed at the start, during initial training. Even professionals with past working experience of working in a similar organization may not know the employer’s expectations. Therefore, it is crucial to address and reiterate the expected objectives.
Usually, onsite call centers have wallboards with instructions on them. Call centers can leverage tools like home-agent wallboards for this purpose. Additionally, creating an online help repository for the team can help agents refer to it when needed, and get clarity on instructions.
Choose Relevant Metrics
Setting KPIs (key performance indicators) against objectives helps agents prioritize tasks and fulfill duties. The best practice is to choose the most relevant performance metrics to avoid clutter and confusion. A policy of reporting can help managers monitor the performance of remote resources. The following metrics apply to both outsourcing solutions and an organization’s contact center:
First Contact Resolution (FCR)
The number of customer queries (via calls, live chat, social media messages, and emails) resolved in the first interaction. It is one of the most crucial metrics that reflect the quality of individual agents.
Average Handle Time (AHT)
AHT is the time it takes an agent from attending to a customer’s query to ending the interaction. These metrics give insights into an agent’s efficiency.
Call Abandonment Rate (CAR)
Call abandonment rate is the number of calls abandoned by customers before speaking to an agent. High waiting times for inbound and unannounced calls by an outbound contact center usually result in high abandonment rates.
Depending on the nature and priorities of a business, the choice of other performance metrics may differ. Besides individual metrics, some important quality metrics are CSAT Score (customer satisfaction score), and NPS (net promoter score).
Use the Right Tools
To effectively monitor your remote contact center agents, you need the right tools. This includes a reliable contact center platform that allows you to track agent performance and gather data on key metrics. You may also want to invest in monitoring software that allows you to record calls, as well as evaluate calls along with chats, email, and SMS so that all evaluations can be recorded and accessed from a single solution.
Provide Regular Feedback on Customer Interactions
Forming a QA team composed of senior and top-performing agents is crucial to finding gaps in the quality of service. An effective QA team monitors customer interactions across channels and provides agents with feedback. Quality assurance identifies patterns in customer behaviors and agent responses to create coaching material. Based on QA’s observations, companies plan coaching sessions for the team and individual agents. Continuous feedback on the agent’s performance eventually improves the overall quality of service.
Monitoring every customer interaction is neither feasible nor practical for QA teams. Working with remote contact center agents adds to the difficulty. However, utilizing call recording and speech analytics software can maximize the feedback and ensure a more efficient QA. Different tools powered by natural language processing (NLP) understand the sentiment from call interactions to provide insights. A QA equipped with such tools can significantly boost the quality of service.
Celebrate Successes
Celebrate the successes of your remote contact center agents. When an agent achieves a high level of performance or meets a key goal, make sure to acknowledge and celebrate their success. This helps to reinforce positive behaviors and encourages your agents to continue performing at a high level.
Set Suitable Quality Parameters for Every Channel
With more businesses offering omnichannel customer support, agents may have to answer queries across different channels, i.e., calls, live chat, and emails. It is crucial to understand that the dynamics of every medium are different. For example, first contact resolutions could be higher with live chat as compared to via email support.
The same performance parameters suitable for one channel may not work for another. Understand the needs of every channel, then choose the suitable quality parameters for each.
This practice can save your remote agents from confusion and encourage better and more accurate reporting.
Encourage Collaborations
Collaboration among remote call center agents benefits every company whether it is an IT support company or any product-focused business. Collaborating on tasks together creates team spirit which can help overcome challenges. Also, since not everyone has the same level of expertise or capabilities, especially the new agents, they can learn from the senior and more experienced members of the staff.
In addition to better monitoring, a collaboration between your remote contact center and onsite department such as the sales team further helps streamline call routing, and ultimately boosts operational efficiency.
Continuously Improve: Continuously monitor and analyze agent performance data to identify areas for improvement. Use this information to develop training programs or coaching sessions to help your agents improve their performance. By continuously improving your monitoring processes, you can help your remote contact center agents deliver exceptional customer service and achieve better results.
Conclusion
Monitoring remote contact center agents allows businesses to offer quality service and improve customer satisfaction leading to increased customer retention, and lifetime value. Improving or revamping your existing performance monitoring model can make a substantial difference. Great customer experience, higher agent productivity, and employee engagement yield multiple benefits to businesses ultimately boosting long-term financial success.